Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  The black hole, she noticed, was gone, so perhaps the timelike conduit had been spacelike as well. Moments more passed before a new realization hit home, penetrating the daze that fogged her thoughts.

  “Jon! We’re going to live!”

  Kevyn felt the relief bursting through his thoughts. “My God. . . .”

  She politely refrained from commenting on the momentary crack in his atheist facade. The feeling behind his words was definitely one of awe, even reverence. She could also sense lingering echoes of an earlier belief, possibly belief acquired as a child, complete with the image of a white-bearded father figure in the deep background.

  She also felt his embarrassment as he tried to cover the instant’s lapse. “How long do you think it’s been?”

  “A long time,” Kevyn replied. “A very long time.”

  “Stephen? Can you give us any idea?”

  There was no response.

  “Stephen?” Kevyn called, worried now. The Hawking’s AI was as much a friend and fellow crew member as any of the organics with the Far Star, and more than many. She’d been working with him since before they’d left Earth, and she’d learned she could talk with him without having to constantly shield against his emotions, a refreshing change. “Stephen? Are you there?”

  Jon was already at the console, checking the readouts.

  “The Ship AI ought to be on-line,” he said. “But there’s nothing. No damage that I can see. He may have had a processor core burnout. I can’t even get a reboot sequence here.”

  And yet the probe’s various automated systems, systems run and monitored by the AI, were still on-line. The bulkheads continued to show a flawlessly projected 360 degrees about the ship, of neatly ordered ranks of stars skipping past. Their relative speed must still be very high to create the sense of movement against so vast a background, though there still was no feeling of acceleration, and they remained adrift in Hawking’s compartment, in free fall. Golden stars slipped past in gentle silence, falling into the central hub as they penetrated the cathedral’s inner wall. Kevyn guessed that they must either be traveling at several thousand times the speed of light, or moving so close to the speed of light that time dilation had slowed Hawking’s passage of time to almost nothing relative to the rest of the universe.

  Damn it, Stephen must still be okay. It as he who created the illusion that Hakwing’s bulkheads were transparent, he who calculated each star position from incoming visual data that would have been completely incomprehensible to merely human observers.

  But why couldn’t he speak?

  The shells of stars appeared to be arrayed in a kind of latticework, each a precise distance from its neighbors. She couldn’t tell how far apart they were—she needed Stephen’s instrumentalities for that—but guessed they were close to one another—less than half a light-year or so.

  She blinked. How could she know that, even as a guess? Each star was a bright but dimensionless point of light. There were no visual clues, none that would make sense to her, to let her gauge distance or separation. And yet she knew that her guess was accurate.

  “I think,” she told Jon, “that we’re not alone. I think we’re being taken somewhere.”

  “I wish we’d hurry up and get there,” he grumbled. She could feel his fear returning now, as the initial relief at having escaped the Maelstrom faded. “This scenic tour is giving me the crawlies.”

  And then the trip was over, as the Hawking vanished around them, and they found themselves standing in . . . a place.

  The transition was disturbing in its ease. She’d been adrift in microgravity in the classic zero-G relaxed posture, knees bent, arms hanging limp in front of her. When Hawking vanished, she was abruptly standing, with what felt like a full gravity holding her to the floor, but no memory of having straightened up. Jon, at her side, was so startled he grabbed for empty air and very nearly fell.

  “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But we’re not where we were.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  They appeared to be on a plane, a perfectly flat expanse stretching out around them in all directions. The ground by their feet was smooth, hard, and appeared translucent, like black-tinted glass. Farther away—several tens of meters or so—it appeared to fade away into nothingness, allowing the stars to show through.

  And stars there were, thought not in the burning, clustered mass of the Center. Their vantage point seemed now to be just above the galactic core, looking down into the blaze of stars at the hub, but from a distance, Kevyn estimated, of perhaps ten thousand light-years. From here, the hub was a flattened sphere of stars, a hundred billion suns of predominantly red and orange hues swarming together in a gentle, golden glow. Nebulae tinged with reds and greens and swirls of midnight black, circled the hub, billowing high in cumulus ramparts, all edged and gilded in silvery reflected light.

  The spiral arms stretched far, far beyond the hub, winding traceries of stars, these in blues and gentle whites. The galactic arms, she thought, were dimmer than she’d expected, about as bright as the Milky Way in the darkest of Earth’s skies, though there seemed to be more bright stars defining the edges of each arm, like bright white beacons.

  She was a bit relieved to see that the rigid precision of the inner hub’s latticework of stars was less obvious out here, almost invisible. She could still see an underlying order, clusters of stars in city-grid patterns and aglow along interconnecting lines and curves, but there were randomly scattered stars as well, by the hundreds of billions. The Galaxy, it seemed, was not completely tamed, at least, in its outlying marches.

  The Galaxy stretched out at their feet, the arms stretching toward distant, invisible horizons. Hanging overhead, a second spiral glowed in soft golds and blues, close enough to reach out and touch, it seemed like.

  It was close; she could see how the spiral arms of both galaxies were already slightly distorted, reaching toward one another across the void. She could see that that galaxy, too, had stars arrayed in lines, curves, and shells, though the outskirts appeared completely natural, untouched by technology or Mind.

  She stared at that other galaxy a moment, trying to remember. She’d received an astronomy download once that mentioned that M-31 was approaching the galaxy Humankind called the Milky Way, that it would collide with the Milky Way in three billion years . . . or was it four? It was larger than Earth’s galaxy, tilted sharply, its hub less than a galaxy’s width away . . . say, a hundred thousand light-years. In Kevyn’s time, M-31 had been a bit more than two million light years distant. If that awesome spiral stretched overhead was M-31, those three billion years had already passed.

  She wished she could remember whether the figure had been three or four billion years. Then she shrugged. What’s a billion years, more or less, among friends?

  Jon stood beside her, breathing hard, fists clenched. “Where . . . where are we? What land of place is this?”

  “We’re not really standing unprotected out in open space,” she replied, “if that’s what you mean. It must be the same sort of projection we use for seeing out of the Hawking.” Reaching out, she took several steps forward, wondering if she would encounter a wall or barrier. There was none that she could feel. “This place was prepared for us, obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “We’re still breathing. Temperature feels about the same as on board the Hawking.” She flexed her knees slightly. “Gravity feels about right. Someone has gone to quite a bit of trouble to make sure we’re comfortable.”

  “Or at least alive,” Jon said. “There’s no place to sit.”

  As if in answer, a portion of the black flooring extruded silently upward, shaping itself into a smooth block at chair-seat height. Jon looked at the offering angrily, then shouted at the unseen ceiling. “Show yourselves! Damn it, who are you?”

  And they were surrounded by light.

  Kevyn tried to make out shapes within the glow that suddenly filled the
space around them so thickly that the view of the twin galaxies was obscured. There were shapes . . . geometrical figures, patterns, sinuosities, movements, all shifting and blossoming in colors ranging from deep red to piercing violet.

  The effect was utterly bewildering, without any order or sense that she could make out. The light appeared to be composed of distinct units, but those units were in constant motion, interpenetrating one another, blending, merging, separating again. They ranged in size from firefly pinpoints of dazzling light, to fast-moving storm clouds scudding low overhead. Most were more or less human-sized, if she could accurately judge scale and distances with no reliable frame of reference. Bars, tubes, spheres, pyramids, and vastly more complex and irregular shapes flitted, drifted, merged, and glowed.

  For a moment, she tried to focus on one particular set of shapes that appeared linked somehow, though with no visible connection. Four tetrahedra outlined in silver-blue light were shifting in a dance of perfectly matched geometric patterns, expanding, shrinking, turning themselves inside out. The match was perfect, as though she were watching four holographic movies of the same animation, displayed in perfect synch.

  She wondered if the four objects might be four intelligent beings in communication with one another, sharing shapes, perhaps, as they shared thoughts. Tentatively, she formed a thought of her own, a greeting, and projected it at the nearest tetrahedron.

  There was no immediate effect, but a moment later, two of the shapes suddenly swelled larger, growing enough to join one another, creating a single, larger, more complex shape. A moment later, all had merged into one, which hovered before her, pulsating rapidly, before it abruptly unfolded itself inside out, then dwindled to a silver pinpoint and vanished.

  “Four-dimensional,” she said aloud, stunned.

  Damn it, she needed to think, to reason through what was going on. Raising her hand, she looked at the fingers, remembering an old illustration of hyperdimensional geometry. If .she were to stick her three-dimensional hand into the plane of a two-dimensional world—Abbott’s Flatland—the inhabitants of that world would perceive five separate circles growing from dimensionless points, one marking the intersection within the plane of each of her fingers. As her fingers moved deeper, the circles would expand . . . then abruptly coalesce into one large, irregularly oblong shape as the palm of her hand crossed the plane.

  What she had just seen might, might be a four-dimensional analogue of that example, the separate pieces of a four-dimensional being intersecting with three-dimensional space.

  Maybe. Or maybe it was something different, something so completely different from all human experience that she simply could not comprehend. Much of the motion and shape-shifting around her, she realized, danced tantalizingly just beyond her mental grasp. She was having trouble holding individual shapes and patterns in her mind as they flowed from one to another, or rotated strangely and disappeared, as though her brain simply couldn’t wrap itself around more than a fraction of what she was perceiving.

  They had to represent intelligence. Disembodied, noncorporeal consciousness? Pure thought? Or something unimagined, unimaginable? They, or this place, at least, clearly were responding to their thoughts. The floor had changed when Jon wanted a seat, and these shapes had appeared when he demand they show themselves.

  She reached out, trying to feel the mind or minds that must be around them, but felt . . . nothing. Nothing but a cold emptiness, without even the sense that the two of them were being watched. She did feel Jon’s mind, a bright, churning flame and fluttering inner voice, just behind her. He was on the edge of panic, and trying desperately to hold himself together.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “I’m . . . okay. What are those things? The aliens?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “I’ve been trying to touch their minds, and I can’t, like there’s nothing there to touch.”

  “Then what the hell are we seeing?”

  “It might be another holographic display of some sort. They appeared when you told them to show themselves. But . . . I can’t feel them. They’re not really there.”

  “I don’t . . . understand. None of this makes sense, damn it!”

  She could feel his frustration, as well as the fear. “It wouldn’t,” she said. “It couldn’t.” She shook her head, trying to order her thoughts. “We’re in New Times Square.”

  “What?”

  “An example I heard in a xenosoc course I took once. Imagine you’re a Cro-Magnon man plucked up by a time machine from in front of your nice, cozy cave, oh, thirty thousand years before our time. Next thing you know, you’re dropped off in New Times Square in 2150. After dark in the Manhattan metplex. What would you make of it?”

  “ ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology “ ‘. . . is indistinguishable from magic,’ yes. But it’s more than that. How much would you even be able to perceive? The fliers. The lights. The holos. The gretchies and ad-floaters. The metplex dome. The towers.

  “Someone from just a couple of hundred years ago wouldn’t be able to understand half of what he saw, and a lot of it would look like magic. The Cro-Magnon man . . . nothing he has in his experiential library would give him what he needed to process the input he’d be getting. Just as a baby has to learn how to see, the Cro-Magnon would have to learn how to process what he was seeing, hearing, even feeling. If he didn’t go insane first.

  “Now, that poor time-traveling Cro-Magnon man is separate from us by thirty thousand years. These people . . . or whatever they are, are removed from us by at least ten thousand times that span. We’d have a better chance trying to understand the mind of God. And we don’t have a prayer of understanding what we see.”

  “Well, look,” Jon said. Desperation fluttered beneath the surface of his thoughts. “I don’t care how far in the future we are, these people still communicate, right? That’s what you were trained for . . . to facilitate communications with alien contacts. So . . . do it! Facilitate! Make contact!”

  “Don’t you think I’ve been trying?” she snapped. “Damn it, there’s nothing out there!”

  The lights around them had been changing as they talked, taking on more and more definition. The geometric patterns and three-D hypersurfaces continued their mingling dance, but other shapes and masses were building themselves up out of pure light. Though she could still make out the vast swirls of the two galaxies beyond, she was also aware of what seemed to be corridors, plazas, courtyards, and soaring, ethereal structures, all as insubstantial as mist, all carved from shimmering masses of pure light.

  When she tried to focus on any one piece of architecture, however, she found that it tended to slip away beyond her grasp . . . or morph gently into something else, something not quite within her ken. She decided that the impressions she had of buildings and courtyards must be constructs of some sort within her own mind, her brain’s attempts at making the incomprehensible comprehensible.

  There were beings within those shape-shifting streets and concourses, however; wraiths of fog and dreams that, unlike the background, actually became more solid as she concentrated on them. She could never make out detail, however. Some of those wraiths had the feel of machines—hard-shelled, glittering lensed constructs, all curves and smooth surfaces, floating a meter above the ground. Most were nothing but shifting and insubstantial shapes molded from the fog of light that pervaded everything.

  Angles were strangely twisted and always changing. Perspective did odd things, as though she were standing in the midst of an Escher print given three dimensions . . . or more.

  Forget Cro-Magnon man, she thought. She was a fish, the first fish to crawl from the seas of Earth to find, not mud flats and barren rock, but a city, a world ablaze in light and a technology so far beyond her comprehension that she was having trouble even recognizing it as anything more than a meaningless blur.

  And yet someone, or some aspect, of this place did respond to them. She focused again on communicating her th
oughts, holding steady in her mind the desire, the need to communicate. . . .

  Four shapes appeared before her, shining blue-and-silver trapezoids, the geometry of the shifting patterns within turning themselves inside out. She took a deep breath, opening herself, reaching out . . .

  . . . and the universe came crashing in upon her.

  Stars cascading past in their billions, gleaming points in the night each attended by myriad artificial worlds and . places, constructs of space-time geometries that were more than worlds, less than pocket universes.

  Worlds of crystal towers and sweeping concourses, or emerald domes and translucent archways ablaze under triple suns . . .

  Worlds of floating city-islands, vast constructs, engineering miracles afloat in a ruby sky . . .

  Worlds, no . . . places where Mind ruled matter and shaped universes.

  A thousand suns, fierce-burning blue-white giants scarcely a hundred millennia old, teased into detonation, supernovae that normally would have each outshone the entire galaxy . . . if not for the black cloud of self-replicating machines surrounding each star, Dyson spheres of motes that drank the radiation and swallowed the outrushing blast of plasma. Matter and energy alike devoured and transformed into something else, an exotic form of patterned information that was neither energy nor matter, but which could be extruded across space and the spaces within space to create a vast and intricate hyperstructure of unknowable purpose spanning the entire Galaxy.

  Dyson spheres, clouds and habitats and artificial worlds aswarm like insects about life-giving suns, each system home to trillions upon trillions of minds, a burgeoning creativity and life . . .

  And more, Dyson spheres of worlds and constructs enveloping the cores of both spiral galaxies, absorbing the energies liberated by the black holes ticking there, and transforming it into . . .

  Life, everywhere there was life, a blossoming universe of life and intelligence in myriad shapes and psychologies, some hauntingly familiar, some so alien it was difficult to recognize it as alive. Living patterns of light and sound adrift in the cloud tops of a Jovian world, dancing to pulsing rhythms of interval and harmony . . . living masses of thermovoric cells deep within the permafrost of a dying desert world, composing poetries of electrical surge and beat . . . living crystals within the depth of fluid environments of hot exotic compounds, their growth patterns across eons capturing philosophies touching on infinity . . . living worlds with radio voices in cosmic harmonies . . . living stars dancing in the energy seas of the galactic core . . . mergings of organic and machine intelligence that spanned the histories of two galaxies and more . . . metaminds, pure consciousness and awareness arising from the mental processes of uncountable trillions of lesser minds, inhabiting clusters and galactic spirals, and a dream with fertility, birth, and new creation . . . a network of metaminds spanning two spiral galaxies, a dozen lesser irregulars, and tens of thousands of galactic clusters, and always reaching out for more, touching the minds inhabiting yet other galaxies, incredibly distant . . .